Follow our tutorial to compress your PDF files on Windows 10 in seconds.
Using an app and your mobile camera, scanning a multi-page document has become child’s play. Just take a photo, crop the image, start over for the following pages, and press a button to get a PDF ready to be shared.
While single-page documents scanned in this way are generally not a problem and can be shared immediately from the smartphone, multi-page PDFs, on the other hand, have a major drawback: their often very heavy weight.
It is therefore impossible to transfer documents that are too large to certain administrative sites which impose a weight limit on the files. You will then need to transfer your PDFs to your PC in an attempt to reduce their weight by compressing them. And you won’t need anything other than your web browser to make it happen. Here’s how.
1. Open the PDF in your browser
To compress your PDF, you will first need to open it with your web browser. Firefox, Edge Chromium and Google Chrome browsers can be used.
Right click on your PDF, go to the Open with menu, and select your web browser. You can also drag and drop your file directly into a tab in your browser.
2. Start the printing module
Once your document is correctly displayed in your browser, choose to start printing it by clicking on the appropriate button or by using the key combination Ctrl + P.
The print settings pane should then open. From the drop-down menu to select the printer to use, choose Microsoft Print to PDF. The option seems natively accessible on Firefox and Edge Chromium, but not on Google Chrome.
If it does not appear on the latter, in the menu to select the printer (Destination), you may need to click See more to be able to choose Microsoft Print to PDF.
3. Print a PDF
When all the print settings are correctly selected, just click the Print button. You will then be prompted to save a new version of your document, in PDF format, on your computer’s hard drive.
Give a new name to your file and validate the registration. If all went well, the new version of your PDF should be smaller in size than the original document.